A new campaign from DoSomething.org and truth is seeking to put an end to a major smoking-related problem, without shaming smokers.

The new campaign is called, “Get the Filter Out” and it has a noble goal: to encourage people to pick up littered cigarette butts in their communities.

When you throw your cigarette butt on the ground, it doesn’t biodegrade and disappear. It just sits there. And sits there. And leaches harmful toxins into the ground. And then sits there some more. It never goes away.

Not unless someone picks it up and disposes of it properly.

To understand the scope of this problem, Upworthy brought a group of volunteers to Union Square in NYC.

The goal? To see how many cigarette butts we could pick up in an hour.

The result was a bit jarring. Literally.

They filled a huge jar with cigarette butts.

What’s so cool about this campaign is that the goal is not to shame people out of smoking. There are plenty of other campaigns doing that. The “Get The Filter Out” campaign is all about raising awareness about the massive environmental problem of cigarette butts collecting on the ground as litter.

According to truth, 23% of teens smoked in 2000. As of 2014, only 8% of teens smoke. That’s a huge decline in teenage smokers, but (perhaps more importantly for the environment) it’s also a lot fewer cigarette butts being tossed out into the street.

http://twitter.com/#!/markknoller/status/342417838293807105 Attorney General Eric Holder sat down for an interview with Pete Williams of NBC News and admitted that, under his leadership, things have gotten “a […]